Baghdad caught in a ring of fear, waiting for US to wave magic wand

Baghdad: Along Iraq’s constantly shifting frontline, where its military has retreated in the face of a furious assault from Sunni insurgents, there is little buffer between civilians and the militants’ advance.

Villages of ethnic minorities are targeted and shelled relentlessly for days, residents are shot and taken hostage. Days later their bodies are dumped, often mutilated, in a chilling warning to others not to resist.

City of fear: Baghdad's citizens do not know when the next blow will fall. Photo: Tyler Hicks/New York Times

Caught dangerously unprepared early on in the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as it mowed its way through cities and towns in the country’s north, Iraq’s military says it is now fighting back.

And with that, it opened another front in the country’s escalating sectarian conflict – a war of narratives.

Baghdad belt: Iraqi police patrol in the town of Taji, about 20 kilometres north of the capital. Photo: AP

While at Baghdad’s Operations Command, military spokesman General Saad Maan Ibrahim calmly outlines how soldiers are securing the "Baghdad Belt" surrounding the capital, the situation on the ground remains dangerously unstable.

Two car bombs in two days have hit Baghdad’s suburbs, the latest killing 19 and injuring at least 42, while residents in vulnerable neighbourhoods say they feel they are little more than easy targets for ISIL’s planned assault on the capital. Both sides claim control of the vital Baiji oil refinery.

Advertisement

But the only action that can save Baghdad and its outlying suburbs now, says terror expert Hisham Hashemi, is a coalition of all Sunni fighters backed by United States airpower, tasked with fighting back against ISIL.

You will now receive updates fromBreaking News Alert

Breaking News Alert

The chief researcher from the Rafidain Centre for Strategic Studies in Baghdad said one Sunni leader he had spoken to – whom he declined to name – had just one condition for forming the coalition: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki must go.

Iraqi Christian families who fled from the northern city of Mosul and nearby towns in the Kurdish-held city of Erbil. Photo: AP

“The Sunnis do not want to come together to fight the militants this because they cannot trust the government – it is a sectarian government – and they say 'why would I fight ISIL, jeopardise my life and then be rejected by the government?'.”

Advisers, believed to be from the US and Jordanian intelligence services, were mediating between the Iraqi government and Sunni leaders to heal those rifts, he says.

Iraqi Kurdish forces take up positions in the battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) near the northern city of Kirkuk. Photo: AFP

Meanwhile, Dr Hashemi describes the Iraqi Army as “waiting for the magic wand of the Americans” while the security situation deteriorates.

There is no doubt ISIL’s strategic aim is Baghdad, via the Baghdad Belt, he says.

“In the next week ISIL will start a fierce campaign to control Baghdad Belt,” Dr Hashemi predicts, “especially with Ramadan coming – they see the holy month as providing them with extra powers.”

Sabah Karkhout al-Halbousi, the president of the Anbar Provincial Council, has been in Baghdad this week to request military support for his besieged province.

Already ISIL, backed by other Sunni insurgents, have taken the Anbar towns of Qaim, Rawah and Anah and are now heading towards the city of Haditha, where the Haditha Dam on the edge of the Euphrates River is now at risk.

The dam, just under 200 kilometres from Baghdad, provides one-third of the country’s electricity and if released by the militants would cause serious flooding south of the capital.

The situation is so perilous that the Iraqi military deployed more than 2000 soldiers to protect the dam from possible attack, Associated Press reported.

But while Mr Halbousi had a positive response to his request for additional military support, he is going home empty-handed when it comes to a political solution to the sectarian violence that is again tearing Iraq apart.

Just five days before ISIL swept into the northern city of Mosul and took control on June 9, catching the government and the military totally unprepared, he was again in talks with the Iraqi government, trying to broker a deal to end deep-seated distrust between the Sunni tribes and the Shiite-led government.

“We were trying to pull the rug out from under the feet of ISIL with this deal and we could not because of the actions of the government and the military,” Mr Halbousi says with open frustration. “We know there are sleeper cells in Anbar – the situation is now really serious because it includes not just ISIL, but also the tribes, the Anbar rebels, the ex-Baathist officers and the Naqshbandi [militia].”

Mr Maliki is focused on a military solution at the expense of a less violent political fix, Mr Halbousi says.

“So many times we discussed with the government the legitimate claims of the people of Anbar,” Mr Halbousi said, “and so many times they negotiated with us and even agreed to our demands, only to fail to deliver on them in practice.”

Despite his criticisms, he does not believe that the demand for Mr Maliki to step down will resolve anything – the prime minister is influenced by those in his party and other powerful interests, he says, and you cannot remove them all. “We should instead be concerned with the unity of the Iraqi people.”

He does wish that Mr Maliki’s speech on Wednesday – where he rejected the formation of a national unity government – was not so “reckless”.

"We are really desperate now, people’s spirits are really low and the speech was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.

He is not the only one concerned at the prime minister’s intransigence.

The powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose re-formed Mahdi Army will not join other Shiite militia to fight under the command of the Iraqi military against ISIL, on Thursday called for a national emergency government.

The government "must fulfil the legitimate demands of the moderate Sunnis and stop excluding them because they have been marginalised", he said. “We need to rush the formation of a national government with new names from all backgrounds and not based on the usual sectarian quotas.”

Mr Sadr’s intervention came just days before the first meeting of Iraq’s new parliament, scheduled for July 1.

Mr Maliki's State of Law coalition won the most seats in the April 30 election, but not enough to form government in his own right – he needs coalition partners and it is on this point that the United States, Britain and other allies are pushing for a more inclusive administration.

Formerly one of Sadr's key leaders in the Mahdi Army but now firmly aligned to the prime minster, Sheikh Raad al-Khafaji, says all of Baghdad is now a training camp for the thousands of Shiite volunteers who showed up to fight ISIL either with the Mahdi Army or the official military.

He insists his volunteer fighters are under the control of the military – a clear, but as yet untested change from its previous incarnation – and indeed as Fairfax Media sat down to interview the sheikh, an officer from the Iraqi Army arrived at his heavily guarded compound to discuss aid distribution.

Meanwhile Iraq’s fledgling civil society groups are watching with horror at the unfolding human rights abuses committed by all sides in the conflict.

“Does Iraq really need more widows and orphans?” asks Hanaa Edwar, the secretary-general of the Iraqi human rights group al-Amal Association. “We already have three million orphans and 1.5 million widows, so this is the big question for Iraq – the terrorists have taken everything very easily, and as always it is families paying the price.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Mahdi Army has pledged to fight under the command of Iraq's military. The earlier version also misidentified Sheikh Raad al-Khafaji as one of Mr Sadr's key leaders in the Mahdi Army. He is a former leader in the Mahdi army. The story has been amended to reflect the corrections.